Wow, so what a fabulous week at IT/DevConnections! It wouldn’t be a conference in Vegas if I didn’t arrive home completely exhausted and of course I am exhausted. With that though I wanted to recap some of the highlights of the week.

The Venue

I really enjoyed the venue that was chosen for the conference this year. It was at the Aria and their conference area layout is great. Even though there were several learning tracks (Windows, Exchange, SharePoint and Development) the layout of this venue made it feel more like one giant community. Regardless of your specialty you could enjoy lunch with anyone and still have great technical information to share. I personally enjoy collaborating with people from other companies, because I feel I always learn something new. These conversations can also lead to new business contacts and sometimes even new friendships.

Great Technical Content

The conference has a lot of great technical content regardless of the technology track that was followed. The speakers were excellent and it was obvious a lot of time was put into bringing in the right experts. The other nice thing is that you can cross over to other technology tracks. If your specialty is Windows, but you want to know more about Exchange Powershell you can! No limitations here.

The Microsoft Community

This conference really has a great Microsoft Community presence and my favorite part about the Microsoft community is how amazing and kind they all are. The experts are all approachable and will share ideas or even have a drink with you! That aside I think that with the recent changes that Microsoft is making to their conference approach; a conference like IT/Dev Connections will be very important going forward. If you missed the announcement earlier this year, Microsoft has announced that all smaller conferences including the larger TechEd will fall under one Unified Technology Conference in Chicago this year. In talking to other conference attendees the general concern about Microsoft’ new conference approach is how organizations will decide who to send. The consensus was that it would be impossible for organizations to send all of their technical folks to one conference. That being said it is going to be nice to continue to have another smaller conference option through IT/Dev Connections.

Reflecting

In the days going forward I will continue to reflect on everything that I learned, and how I can apply it to my upcoming projects at work. The slides are also available online just in case I didn’t get to go to a session. For now though, I think I will take the opportunity to take a nap!